Library of Congress Adds New Material to Online American History

AHA Staff |Apr 1, 2002

The Library of Congress has further enriched its already large collection of material on American history, with digitized versions of Samuel Morse Papers, Woodie Guthrie correspondence, and material on American expansion, the Haymarket Affair, and the church in the Southern black community. All these are available from the library's popular American Memory site at http://www.loc.gov.

The Morse Papers, consisting of about 6,500 items that document the invention of the telegraph as well as aspects of Morse's life, includes the first telegraph message sent on May 24, 1844. The Guthrie correspondence, dating mostly to the early 1940s provide insights into the singer's art and life. The Haymarket Affair collection contains images of original manuscripts, photographs and artifacts relating to the trial of the "Chicago Anarchists," and was digitized by the Chicago Historical Society. The documents on the American expansion are from a collection of Mystic Seaport detailing maritime expansion in the 19th century. A compilation of printed texts from the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill constitute the collection on the church in the Southern Black Community. These texts, which include slave narratives, trace the evolution of protestant Christianity in the South. The digitization of all these collections was made possible by grants from the AT&T Foundation and the Ameritech National Digital Library Competition.